Guidelines for translators

This document contains guidelines for translators who translate help
documentation for the project.

Note: When you see the term "Sunbird" in this document, it refers to any version of
Mozilla Calendar.

Introduction

Sunbird's help is written in US English. It can be translated into other
languages.

Sunbird keeps the content of the help for each language separate. All
languages share the help viewer code. The visual style of the help depends
on the theme (skin) that the user chooses, so it is independent of the
language.

Files

For information about getting source files, see the
Source files page.
The US English help content is in the directory calendarhelp/locale/en-US/calendarhelp.
This directory contains all the files that you need to translate.

Translate the contents of files with these extensions:

.xhtml

The text of the help.

.css

Reusable content

.png

Image (in the image directory)

.properties

Collating order

Do not change the names of the files—leave them in English.

XHTML files

An xhtml file contains HTML wrapped in XML.
The HTML is normal HTML, but the tagging is strict.

To translate the file, translate the content of the tags.
Also translate the contents of any alt or
title attributes.
Do not change any other attributes.

For example, to translate:

<h3 id="words">Words used in the application</h3>

Translate only the text 'Words used in the application'.
Do not change id="words"—leave the id attribute in English.

CSS file

In the CSS file, help.css, translate the text inside doublequote characters.
Do not change anything else.

PNG files

Some PNG files contain translatable text, and others do not.
Look at each file and make a decision whether to translate it.

If you need to translate the file, try to get the base version with no text.
Copy the base version and add text in your language so it has the same meaning
as the US English version.

If there is no base version available, you might have to remove the text from
the English version or create a new image from scratch.

Save the translated images as 256-color PNG files.
Do not change the image size.

Properties

The file help.properties contains the collating sequence for your locale, so
that the index builder and the glossary builder sort entries in the correct
order.
In this file, specify the sequence of lowercase characters used for sorting.